INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — Tommy Paul is going to be seriously annoyed if his stay in the top 10 of the men’s tennis rankings amounts to a five-week cup of coffee.
When tennis players go into a soliloquy about how they don’t pay attention to the rankings or have the faintest idea how many points they have — or stand to lose — from week to week or match to match, they’re not being entirely honest.
These men and women signed up for a life where numbers define them. They know there is a difference between being No. 5 and No. 6, and No. 10 and No. 11, and No. 1 and No. 2. One number meaning that much is pretty arbitrary and maybe even unfair, but it’s real, and not just because they have contracts laden with performance bonuses and the easier money that comes with being inside the top 10. In Hyman Roth’s words from “The Godfather Part II”: This is the business they have chosen.
So it is for Paul and Taylor Fritz, the top two American men. Both are off to promising starts in the so-called Sunshine Double of the BNP Paribas and Miami Opens, at slightly different altitudes. Fritz is holding steady at world No. 4 while nursing an injury to his right oblique muscle; Paul was hanging on to No. 10 until shoulder pain and a stomach bug that ran through the field in Acapulco, Mexico, cost him some of those precious ranking points. When Stefanos Tsitsipas won the Dubai Tennis Championships in the United Arab Emirates last weekend, the American ended up on the outside looking in once more, though he had more immediate concerns than his ranking.
“I was so sick. I wasn’t following any of that stuff,” Paul, 27, said after winning his opening match at Indian Wells 6-3, 6-1 against compatriot Tristan Boyer. “I was throwing up.”
Paul beat Cam Norrie 6-3, 7-5 on Sunday to make the round of 16.
With Jannik Sinner serving a three-month anti-doping suspension, Paul is the No. 10 seed at Indian Wells despite being No. 11 in the world. During Paul’s short stint in the top 10, his and Fritz’s occupation of two spots gave American men’s tennis a share of the top of the sport, which it rarely has had in the past 15 years. Fritz and Paul this year, Fritz and Frances Tiafoe in 2023, John Isner and Mardy Fish in 2012, and Andy Roddick and Fish in 2011. That’s it for American duos on the ATP Tour. There are three women inside the WTA top six right now and four in the top eight.
Tommy Paul eased past 2022 champion Cam Norrie in the California desert. (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)
Paul said the biggest change in his life during that five-week stint was that he no longer had to scroll to find his name when he pulled up the rankings on his phone. It felt like being 10 years old again, when he made the top 100 in his region for 12 and under: His name was on the first page. He and Fritz, also 27, are on the big courts in Indian Wells, and they will be again in Miami, if their bodies hold. Fans will be circling their names on playing schedules and making sure not to miss their matches.
They’ve been to the last matches in Grand Slams multiple times, becoming known quantities among tennis fans and American influencers — Morgan Riddle and Fritz are an item, and Paul is dating Paige Lorenze. For a time, Riddle and Lorenze were probably more recognizable; Fritz’s and Paul’s journeys to the semifinals and, in Fritz’s case, last year’s U.S. Open final means this is less the case now. This is not just the business they have chosen but the life of which they had dreamed.
Fritz and Paul don’t bother with the pretense that their climb up the ladder has not shifted how they perceive themselves and how the world perceives them, but they insist it has not changed how they go about their training and preparation. On the women’s side, Emma Navarro, another top-10 newbie in recent months, has said much the same. Seeing a single digit next to her name has been living rent-free in her brain. Coco Gauff and Jessica Pegula are used to it; Madison Keys is getting re-accustomed after her Australian Open win.
GO DEEPER
Emma Navarro’s reluctant step into the tennis limelight
Paul went to Australia intending to leave with a top-10 ranking. Now that he has made it, even if just for a bit, he’s thinking a little differently.
“I know how I play. I know how good I am,” he said.
So does Fritz.
“I wanted to show that is my level,” he said of making his top-10 debut in October 2022. He was speaking from Acapulco last week, where his abdominal injury forced him to withdraw to save himself for Indian Wells.
“Same thing now,” he said. “I finished in the top five. I want to show that I am a top-five player.”
In an interview last month, Paul also explained that he didn’t want to be a cheap top-10 win for someone. It’s possible he jinxed himself. His shoulder was acting up in Dallas, where he lost to a resurgent Denis Shapovalov, who went on to beat Fritz too before winning the title. Then he gave compatriot Marcos Giron a walkover in Acapulco, which doesn’t count as a win, but still.
For those unfamiliar with how the tennis ranking system works, each win on the professional tours is worth a certain number of points. Wins at smaller tournaments are worth less than wins at larger tournaments. The season is essentially a series of pop quizzes, midterms and final exams. Players emerge from each week with a points tally a bit like a grade, which all lead to their final points total and attached ranking at the end of the season.
There’s a but. Those points drop off in 52-week cycles. So a player who earns 1,000 points for winning Indian Wells, say, is competing against not just their fellow players but also last season’s version of themselves when they return a year later. A round-of-16 exit that year would technically gain points for getting that far, but it comes out in the wash as a net loss. Players enter tournaments with points to “defend,” and when they are high on the ladder, they have targets on their backs. They have to get used to players coming at them with nothing to lose.
“You become a great win for everybody and anybody,” said Brad Stine, who coaches Paul and has taken this journey with other players before, including Jim Courier, who went all the way to No. 1 in the early 1990s. “That translates to at least some players producing tennis at an even higher level than what is considered to be their norm. Guys come out and light it up.”
Stine is talking about peaking, which any tennis fan will have seen in an upset defeat for one of the biggest names in the game. The lesser player hits winner after winner, balls hitting the edges of the line time and again that would sail long or wide any other day. For Fritz and Paul, it’s a case of being prepared and learning how to absorb one of the worst feelings on the tennis court if it happens: the feeling that no matter what, there’s nothing to be done.
Taylor Fritz and Tommy Paul won bronze in doubles for the U.S. at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. (Matthew Stockman / Getty Images)
Fritz said he has learned to adapt. He tries not to think of defending points from the previous year. He used to, but he found he played with more intensity when he was trying to match a previous result, then relax, in a bad way, in those weeks when he had nothing to defend.
He realized the year is long. Players have to pick up points wherever they can by going deep in as many tournaments as they can, regardless of what happened at the same event the previous year. And they never know where the points might come from. Fritz, who doesn’t think of himself as much of a clay-court player, went deeper last year on the red dirt at tournaments in Munich, Madrid and Rome than he did on the hard courts of Indian Wells and Miami, which are in two states he has called home.
Paul also said that when he was younger, he entered tournaments thinking about the points he had won at the same event the previous year, which he stood to lose if he did not match those results. He was even thinking that way at the 2024 Australian Open, after making the semifinal there in 2023.
“But then I took a look at it, and I was like, ‘All right, if I lose (in the) first round, I move back six spots or seven spots,’” he said. “When you’re inside the top 20, a large amount of points either moves you up two spots or three spots or moves you back four spots or five spots. So, it’s not the end of the world, and it’s a long season to get it back.”
Stine said it took consistency throughout an entire year for Paul to make the top 10. To go higher than that, into the top five, Paul will have to overcome some mental stumbling blocks. Getting to the top 10 meant not giving up on days when he wasn’t playing well. Paul thinks of his second-round match at Wimbledon last year against Finland’s Otto Virtanen, a dangerous player who has never cracked the top 90.
Virtanen was on fire. Paul wasn’t feeling the ball. He was sluggish and went down two sets to one. But he didn’t go away. He kept getting balls back. He kept making Virtanen make shots. Eventually, the flying Fin came back down to earth and Paul survived, even though he felt like he had been outplayed for most of the afternoon. Absorb the peak. Wait for the trough.
Stine said that day was an example of how Paul has moved away from what he referred to as a talent-based mentality. Players with a talent-based approach bail on matches when their talent isn’t enough to carry them through, when they don’t have their best.
“Your tendency is to give in. We adjusted that to a work-based mentality,” Stine said. Together, he and Paul added tools — such as a slice backhand and better volleys — that allowed him to make adjustments and keep competing when he couldn’t find his A-game.
That’s what he did against Virtanen. Then he played two quality matches before losing to Carlos Alcaraz, the eventual champion.
“It sucked losing in the quarters, but I was proud of my week,” Paul said.
Getting back into the top 10 and rising through it will mean overcoming a different obstacle: performing better in those late rounds and beating the players in the same air as him. He will have to do better than he did in Australia in the quarters against world No. 2 and eventual finalist Alexander Zverev. Paul served for the first two sets and outplayed the world No. 2 for nearly two hours, except when it counted. He lost both sets in tiebreaks, and Zverev cruised away with the third after catching life twice.
Stine said that unless a player is an all-time great, performing well in big matches on big courts against big opponents takes practice, which normally means losing those sorts of matches. Paul hadn’t closed out a lot of Grand Slam quarterfinal sets against a world No. 2. It showed.
“I didn’t execute on anything I wanted to do,” Paul said. “I didn’t give him a chance to maybe miss stuff.” Stine saw him tightening, unable to land first serves, the rhythm of his ground strokes suddenly going missing. He encouraged him to relax, to breathe, to slow down and be brave, to trust himself and play with courage and also to play within himself. Nothing worked.
“It’s a helpless feeling,” Stine said. “It’s a test that you took, and you didn’t pass the test. So you do more research and more studying and retake the test, hopefully, and you perform better the next time.”
(Top photo: Ng Han Guan / Associated Press)
